LEADERS across Europe’s financial-services sector expect that generative artificial intelligence technology will boost productivity and also anticipate that up to a quarter of all roles will require AI training or upskilling over the next six months to a year.
Responding to EY’s European Financial Services AI Survey, 77% of respondents said they were bracing themselves for a “significant impact to their workforce and operations”.
The survey canvassed the views of executives from 60 European financial institutions and the results include the views of administrators, lawyers and wealth managers from the Channel Islands.
Two-thirds (68%) of respondents anticipated that up to a quarter of all roles would require AI training or upskilling over the next six to 12 months, with 17% believing it could be as much as half the workforce.
However, action to realise productivity gains and workforce development through training and upskilling remains limited. More than a third of respondents (35%) said they currently had no plans in place to train their workforce in new and rapidly evolving GenAI technologies, while a further 42% described their plans as being “in their infancy”.
Taking a more focused approach, 12% of leaders stated that they had training in place for targeted groups and just 10% reported having developed plans in use. Only 2% of respondents believed that their workforce was fully equipped to contribute end-to-end to building AI capabilities across their organisation.
Despite the training limitations, the survey found that expenditure on GenAI was already widespread within Europe’s financial sector, with 60% of respondents saying their firm had invested in the technology over the past year.
Leo Boessenkool, partner and leader of EY’s CI technology risk team, said: “It was evident from our discussions with local businesses when conducting the survey that firms are at different stages of their thinking and implementation of Generative AI. However, all understood that AI cannot be a ‘bolt-on strategy’, but rather a fully integrated component of their firms’ strategies.
“Much of the work that has been done in the Channel Islands has been driven by leaders who are passionate about embracing the value that it can bring their clients and their people. The survey’s results highlighted that they must also hone their passion for innovation into actively planning for training and upskilling their workforce in AI technologies and establishing robust governance frameworks to mitigate potential risks.”
The impact of AI on entry-level and graduate talent is a focus area for many banks, insurers and asset managers, with 60% of executives saying they expected new technology to have a significant impact on the roles and tasks undertaken by those joining the workforce. To manage the impact, 35% of executives said they planned to integrate AI training within their graduate programme, while 25% were planning a more widespread restructuring of roles and responsibilities across entry-level positions.
When asked to consider the top attributes that firms would seek as they recruited entry-level talent for a GenAI-enabled workforce, the traits most cited by European financial services leaders were an innovative and interdisciplinary mindset, followed by being tech savvy and experimental.
When asked to consider the top concerns presented by GenAI integration, European financial services leaders were most likely to cite limited understanding and experience of GenAI applications and their impact across the workforce (36%), followed by uncertainty about existing and pending potential regulatory impacts (29%), and ethical issues around GenAI (7%).
Concerns around the ethics of GenAI were centred on privacy (cited by 32% of all respondents), followed by transparency (23%), and the potential for discrimination, bias and lack of fairness (23%).
